Edward Breitweiser is an artist, musician, writer and arts organizer based in my former twin-town of residence, Bloomington-Normal, IL. I believe I first became aware of Edward’s presence in town around 2013? 2014? 2015? (2013-2018 was a complicated blur of years…) when Breitweiser + Junokas performed at ISU galleries. I recall being privy to various actions and output from 201? to 2020, and upon one occasion had the pleasure of meeting up with Eddie and having a highly enjoyable conversation over a couple of beers at Firehouse Pizza in Normal. At some point among the aforementioned complicated blur of years, I acquired a copy of the remarkable zine / catalog he and interdisciplinary artist Dao Nguyen produced for their project Rehearsals for Resistance. This is a fascinating work of writing / ideas / images which I’ve enjoyed examining and contemplating in many sittings over the years since. I think it does well to exemplify the type of depth and consideration Edward puts into his work along with what I perceive as a zen or taoist-like sense of creative openness and play.
He started the music and sonic arts nonprofit Pt.Fwd. around 2018, which since then has curated numerous events in central IL and virtually via Experimental Sound Studio‘s Quarantine Concert series in 2020. These events have included performances by local artists including myself, Yea Big, Ryan Paluczak + Jars Hooch, Runsitter, Bodyman, the Normal Community High School Experimental Ensemble, and others, as well as regional and more widely known experimental artists including Mark Booth, Angel Bat Dawid, Greg Sullo, Jon Mueller, Dorothy Carlos, Claire Rousay, Daniel Wyche, Jeremy Young, John McCowen and others. It’s quite more than encouraging and inspiring to see such excellent active programming and left-field audio creativity on the rise in Bloomington-Normal.
The Edward Breitweiser work presently of central interest for discussion, Wintering, is a deconstructed minimalist abstract expressionist dessert tray of electronics, dealing in textures and their decaying reformations, subtly paralleled tones and overtones, oblong loopings and their permutations. There is an unconscious / mechanical coldness and even a temperature-coldness to these sounds. Despite that which could be a turnoff to some, I receive these sounds as quite pleasingly mellow and meditative.
In their isolation and sparseness I imagine these sounds filling an abandoned warehouse-type building, bright mid-day sun coming through a large row of windows, maybe there is a large hole in the roof with more sunlight and fluffy snowflakes slowly falling in. I imagine this building alone in a rural area among sparse snow-dusted trees and brush with a partially frozen-over stream running nearby, the ground mostly covered in snow. The slow-moving quality of the electronics goes along with the timeless mechanism of nature, which of course isn’t exactly mechanistic despite frequent attribution of machine-like qualities throughout the last century or so. The experience of being alone in nature –surrounded by life / consciousness and activity but that phenomena being on a different plane than our own– is dubious. It’s not only like being surrounded by machines, and it’s not only like being surrounded by the mystical-animist poetry of nature. In one sense we are totally alone and isolated –the only life in a dead world, in another we are steeped in a milieu of seething conscious activity but do not perceive most of it. The present material elements and activity we are unconscious of may have powerful implications upon our present or future. Trees, fungi and other plant life have a type of awareness we do not yet understand, and they engage in communications. Birds and other animals express themselves and communicate to one another in soundforms we tend to comprehend only as novel nonsense. Chemical reactions are happening constantly all around us. There are imperatives, meanings, intentions, happening in all of this activity that we tend to perceive as mechanistic or unconscious; they are just active on planes apart yet inextricable with our own in ways we do not understand.
There’s always been something very intriguing to me about the variety of atonal electronic sounds figuring heavily on this recording. Some works by my friend Phillip Klampe aka Homogenized Terrestrials, Frank Bretschneider, Alva Noto, Morton Subotnik and many others do it to. If I’m properly tuned in, at first I experience a strange visceral reaction that is similar to an emotion but I can’t categorize it. It’s something like seeing a very strange but real creature in person for the first time and being surprised and impressed by how extraordinary it seems. Some insects, birds and aquatic creatures just seem impossible, as if they were dreamt up by mystical artists or science fiction creators. Their behavior, activities and sounds can seem uncanny. There’s something oddly shocking about this that hits me on a primal level. The next phase of my reaction is the beginnings of analyzing and intellectualizing what I’m experiencing. When considering electronic sounds of this category, after the initial wondrous spine-chill has passed I tend to feel as though such sounds are an outcropping of some demiurge; utterances of a Monad stemming back as far as our evolutionary chain goes, exploring a new voice through strange new pathways and bodies. I don’t hear this type of voice much through other electronic music that veers into more structured musical and tonal territories, has an Earthier feel, and doesn’t feel so purely computer or scientifically electro-contraption generated. There is an element in this type of pure electronic sound exemplified by Wintering that seems distinctively indicative of something else, akin to the voices we hear coming from the alternate planes of the nature that surrounds us. I recall in an interview I read long ago Masami Akita saying that noise is like “the collective unconscious of music”. In a weird way, sounds like these to me seem like a facet of the collective unconscious of nature itself.
Inspired by Julia Falkner’s writing, On Cycles, Wintering conceptually taps into the life of nature in an overt way, focusing on the notion of cycles. About this, Edward states in the release notes, “…I am comforted by the subtle flickers of life that surround us. I’m reminded that nature is dormant, not dead, and that this period of rest is a necessary phase in the vibrant return that lays ahead.” Though the activity be unperceivable or alien to our sensibilities, it persists –seethes, even– all around us. This recording, totaling just short of an hour, does well to evoke this cyclical notion of natural forces while also proving to be a fascinatingly tactile and spatially atmospheric experience. The cassette is a lovely frosty white, joined by an accordingly white norelco case and nicely designed pro-printed informative j-card. Both are available for purchase at https://edwardbreitweiser.bandcamp.com/
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